rthstewart | Holiday disasters because misery loves company

Crossposts: http://rthstewart.livejournal.com/118303.html

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Holiday disasters because misery loves company

In anticipation of a BIG WORK THING that may come out next week, I have shoved the hosting of the American gorge-fest known as Thanksgiving off on my foreign-born sister in law. She's very excited to take the mantle from me and rightfully intimidated. I keep saying, no, really, let other people bring vegetables, bread, desserts, liquor, appetizers, etc. etc. Really. Let your 12 guests help.

No, no, no, she insists. She has, at least, realized that a frozen turkey will take a week to thaw in the refrigerator but I do wonder if she's really thought about those inevitable space issues when the turkey comes out and has to sit while you 1) make gravy 2) make mashed potatoes; 3) wait for the stuffing to hit adequate internal temperatures in the now vacated oven to cook the egg in it so you don't inadvertently make everyone sick (or used pastuerized egg product or leave egg out). Oh sweet child of summer, you have no idea what you are in for and really you should take the help offered.

Correllian_sugar in the December meme prompt (and spaces still open!) got all apologetic about asking for cooking successes as well as failures but, in fact, I've got a million of woops stories and I'm really excited to share them. My personal favorite, involving a horse and an exploding sweet potato casserole, I shall save for December. But, in the meantime, I invite you all to share in comments cooking, hosting, travel holiday disasters. And econopodder and knitress I'm looking at you to share some as you've been at my house for plenty of these!

I'll start with a recent one, from last year's Thanksgiving when I ignored the warning voice in my head that said never, EVER use the self clean on your oven right before you are going to need it. I have a beautifully engineered awesome double Miele oven and I made that mistake and ran the self clean -- fortunately only on the top half of the oven the weekend before Thanksgiving. It took me over an hour before I realized nothing in the stuffed upper part of the oven was reheating. Dinner was a bit late that year. MORE WINE.

Speaking of, there was the time I decide to do a lovely caramelized pear salad as a first course. This was when I learned that I, at least, should never drink and caramelize sugar at the same time.

And then there was the time the Labrador ate the Buche de Noel.

When I hosted a Thanksgiving in Romania in the 1990s, we did get a turkey off a truck hijacked by Russians (could not find extra silverware, anywhere, however). Romanian half-sized ovens only had two settings, big flame and little flame, and no window or light in the door so you can't monitor the internal temperature in the oven with the thermometer you ask for someone to pick up for you when they go to Germany for the weekend. So I cooked a turkey with a flashlight and constant open and shutting of the oven door over 3 hours.

And then there was the time a possum got into my pot-a-feu and the racoons ate my Christmas cookies.

Next?

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I think holiday cooking disasters are kind of obligatory. Especially when there is turkey involved.

When my friends and I started our annual Thanksgiving gathering (egads, ten years ago now), none of us knew more than the very basics about cooking a turkey. Half of it came out well cooked...... the other half was still a bit.... frozen... ish.... We also gave up on homemade rolls as being time consuming and messy, and have worked out a very efficient flow for food preparation, where each of us has an assigned task. I am the turkey baster extraordinaire and official masher of potatoes.

Our third year, we made the truly unfortunate mistake of getting extremely drunk Wednesday night. Which left us hung over and not wanting much to do with food during the day on Thursday. Not one of our brighter moments.

And then a non-holiday baking disaster... last spring, baking cupcakes for the raffle during the theater show, I went to put the tray of cupcakes into the oven, and dropped the tray... all over the inside/door of the oven. That was a fun one to try and clean up.

Yep, that old, gosh, it really does take that long to thaw a big bird. I remember once drooling into a mince pie filling by mistake. woops. And really, after that episode with burning the sugar 4 TIMES I really try to be careful about how much I drink whilst actually cooking. I've never tried to do it all while hungover. But heh, if you're among friends, it will all keep a day, surely?

There is a legend in my family of the time a chicken-and-matzo-ball soup, left to simmer overnight, turned blue. Or green. Sources differ. My point is: it changed color in the middle of the night and no one knows why. (I do not think that soup was eaten. It was before my time.)

It could possibly have turned green depending on the kind of pot it was being cooked in?

I was wondering the same... something copper? Or... just ewwww. The first time I brined a bird I realized that it could effect the color of the meat. But I've never had inadvertently blue or green food.

I was thinking copper too. Though I recently learned that steel will turn green due to nitrodation, which is like oxidation, just with nitrogen, so it's possible that there was nitrogen being released by the soup that reacted with the material of the pot?

(I'll just... stop looking for probable causes on this as if it were one of my work projects.....)

I can't remember many true disasters, but there was that time my second cousins came to visit one summer. This was shortly after we got Gigi from the local shelter, and we weren't used to having a dog around the house and the precautions that must be taken. So when everyone came in from hanging around in the yard, eager to eat lunch... we found the dog standing in the middle of the table, scarfing down everything. And then, upon realizing she'd been discovered, she promptly peed in shame. *headdesk* I think we ended up ordering pizza or something.

Pets DO make everything more fun. Cofax and I below are exchanging dog stories, so you are in good company. The possum in the pot-au-feu was a little different. I ran out of space in the kitchen and so once the meat and vegetables were done cooking, I moved this giant pot of stock and things to the back porch, and put a weight on the lid. 2 hours later, and drunk out of my mind on Beaujolais, I open the back door and there's a giant possum sitting there with her head stock in my stock pot and her babies all huddled on the stairs waiting for mom to finish eating.

The raccoons climbed down our chimney one year, pushed back a board and air conditioning unit to reach the basement, and made off with a tray of Christmas cookies. These were VERY DETERMINED raccoons.

*blinks* Wow. That is DEFINITELY some determination there.

Our dog-and-food incidents didn't really correlate to big meals. They were more like, oh, the time Gigi snagged a Tupperware container off the kitchen counter and ate through the plastic in order to scarf the Oreos it was holding. Or the time she ate half a vacuum-sealed brick of Maxwell House coffee. (The shocking thing about that is that she stopped before finishing it, and then apparently learned her lesson and never went after coffee again.) Or the time we coated a guaranteed indestructible rubber dog toy in peanut butter so she'd pay attention to it, and then of course she ate half the toy. *headdesk* Gigi also ate plastic noses off stuffed animals, limbs off of Barbies, and buttons off of clothes left on the floor. There were reasons we called her a living vacuum cleaner. Actually, one of the biggest adjustments I had to make when moving out of my parents' house was realizing that if I dropped food on the floor, I would have to pick it up myself because it wouldn't simply vanish within five seconds.

I think the most normal food snatching Gigi did was when she somehow dragged a blueberry pie off a table at my Aunt Jan's house and licked the whole tin clean.

Dottie -- my parents' current dog -- is more discriminating in her tastes, though she will still jump onto a chair and push her head onto the dinner table given half a chance. *wry*

Thankfully, my mother is still the Turkey Day Cook, and actually enjoys using two big gas grills plus her huge oven to make a truly ridiculous amount of food, usually including two different birds and three different stuffings. Me? I got some pre-sliced Honeybaked ham and will make my personal cheesy potatoes and call it good.

More Wine does seem to be one of the better approaches to these things, though.

So with the stuffings -- or is it dressing? What are the differences? People can get very religious about stuffing and in theory there are lots of regional differences though I've never actually experience it, other than the New England habit of oyster stuffing. I've lived all over the US at this point and it's all basically variations on dried bread, herbs, celery, onion, apple, and maybe dried fruit, sausage, or giblets. My cookbooks always tell me you will find rice dressing in the South, cornbread in the southwest, etc. etc.

One bird is usually traditionally stuffed with bread, herbs, celery, onion, etc. One batch of dressing is made separately, gluten free for my celiac aunt, and one is usually experimental. Tofu, garlic, some new twist on fruit, etc. This batch must be certified to have never come in contact with any of the birds, or half the family won't risk either because they are food-wimps. I don't mind, because that means more leftovers for me, if I'm attending that year.

If you want true food schisms in my family, though, you need to deal with the egg-salad. To celery, or not to celery, that is the question that causes people to nail opposing theses to the front door.

Egg salad? Your pitched battles are over egg salad? Granted I've seen them over wild rice hot dish -- water chestnuts or not? And Jello salad -- green with ginger ale and pretzels or orange with mandarin slices. But never egg salad.

With desserts the inevitable battle of apple, pumpkin and pecan is best solved with All Of The Above.

Wow, those are awesome stories. We've been fairly lucky, aside from the obligatory dog-having stories where the golden retriever takes the top layer off the pumpkin pie, or the labrachow is discovered head-first in the garbage with the turkey carcass.

But we know never to let my oldest brother cook a holiday dinner again. He's a restauranteur. The last time it happened, Christmas dinner was three hours late, and every. single. pot. in the kitchen had to be cleaned. Everything was very tasty, but by the time we ate, it could have been day-old pizza for all I cared.

My sister & I have it all pretty much wired, now; we've been joint-hosting for about seventeen years. We don't experiment (except with breads or desserts which are prepared in advance), we count backwards from when we want the turkey out, and we always cook some stuffing in the turkey (but without egg). That stuffing is always gone by the end of the meal, because it's the best.

Heh. I'm laughing over the brother in the restaurant business. Yep, the food is delicious and can take SO LONG. Pets do have a way of making the event more special. We've got pictures of our labrador removing blue cheese prosciutto canapes from the coffee table. The guest took the picture rather than stopping the dog.

head first in the garbage, oh yes. One lab of ours, after a party, broke into the pantry and ate an entire bag of Doritos, a loaf of bread and a potato. The other Lab, rather than gorging, spent the entire time trying to (and eventually succeeded)in unscrewing the lid on the peanut butter jar. The top half of the jar was licked completely clean and there were globs of peanut butter at the bottom. SO CLOSE AND YET SO FAR.

Once, when I was baking my sister's birthday cake at her house (for reasons that escape me), I took a stick of butter out of the freezer and set it on the counter to soften.

When I came back an hour later, the butter was gone. I found it in the golden retriever's crate. With two dents in it, where she had carried it, but it was too frozen for her to eat. ;-) I ended up carving the indents out, and making the cake with it anyway, after I'd unwrapped the waxed paper.

That dog was sneaky, but nowhere near as determined as the current GR (we call her the Diva), who stole a leg of lamb off the counter at Easter dinner, and took a swipe of ice cream off the spoon as I was serving out my mother's birthday cake. She's the very definition of incorrigible.

DING DING DING. WE HAVE A WINNDER. she STOLE THE EASTER LAMB. What did you end up doing? Just dusting it off as Julia would have done?

Hah! Well, we got lucky--she stole the carved leg after dinner was over, but before we'd started putting everything away. So she got some yummy meat, but didn't ruin dinner.

I'm still amazed at the ice cream, though: the spoon of ice cream was IN MY HAND, heading for Mom's plate, and she jumped up and went for it.

This is the dog who, in three days of rally obedience trials, was (Day 1) excused from the ring for peeing; (Day 2) got a perfect score; (Day 3) won first place. She's entirely unpredictable.

Edited 2014-11-23 22:06 (UTC)

If it's nose level, it's fair game. We had a big rescue dog who just rested his jowls on the counter and would clear it with a single lick. Turned my back and the chicken was GONE. He would also ring doorbells.

Oh dogs.

I feel almost bad for saying that I rarely have cooking disasters, but perhaps it helps that I don't do any holiday entertaining. I am sure I would have disasters if I, say, cooked a christmas dinner for actual people. I must say, though, that reading these comments makes me think that Thanksgiving is even more mammoth than I had assumed.

Thanksgiving is humongous in the US. Whole cooking magazines are devoted to it, people become intensely traditional about it. How else could you explain t hat growing up in my household, Thanksgiving included turkey, ham, creamed onions, orange jello, and enchiladas. The enchiladas were because one part of the family came from the American Midwest -- Chicago -- were that food known as "hot dish" or "casserole" came from -- think canned green beans, canned cream of mushroom soup, and Durkee fried onions. Once that part of the family moved to the American West -- California, they turned the "casserole" into something vaguely but not really Mexican, enchiladas. Families develop intense phobias about certain foods -- in my family's case, it was hysteria over making anything involving a roux -- including gravy and white sauce (for the creamed onions) and passive-aggressive wars would break out where someone would assing the creamed onions or gravy knowing that other members of the family could NOT make these foods. One reason many of these events turn into dessert gorge-fests (a dessert per person) is because no one will part with his or her favorite dessert.

Holiday meals are always a negotiation of which dishes MUST be served, and which dishes someone else can't (or won't) eat. The more people involved, the crazier the results.

I think the weirdest Thanksgivings I've ever had were the one when we visited my Uncle Charles & family and the time a few years later when they came to visit us. Half the dishes were traditional American Midwest... and the other half were Chinese, because that's what my Aunt Ji-lan knows how to cook. I mean, it was very good Chinese food! But pretty random, especially mixed in with the other stuff.

I can't think of any real diaasters, but one year I glanced at the dining table a few minutes before we all sat down and saw our cat perched in the center of the table daintily licking the butter. If I hadn't caught her at it, we might never have known.

When I was very small I gave my dad a bag of chocolate covered cherries, which we foolishly left unattended while we went for a walk. We came home to find little sticky lumps all over the house. The dog had gotten into the bag, but he licked off the chocolate and spit out the cherries, ptui! I know chocolate is supposedly bad for dogs, but they love the stuff, and I have seen dogs eat massive amounts of it without getting sick.

So lucky about the dog because yikes, that can be serious. And the cat was probably all, what? Is there a problem? Cofax reported above about the dog that stole the frozen stick of butter and wasn't able to eat it, though she did bring it to her crate.

Gosh, I can't really think of any cooking disaster I've been part of, unless that defective wine bottle a few Christmases ago counts.

There was the time my dad was making pumpkin pie from scratch. I think I was about 7 or 8, and kinda fascinated by the process. So he's got the pumkin baking in the oven -- whole pumpkin, not quaters on a baking tray. This is important. Why? Because when he took it out of the oven, he lifted it in his potholder-sheathed hands for the three steps to the counter.

On step two, the well-baked pumpkin skinned itself, dropping all of its guts on the floor with a mighty SPLAT!

And that was the last time dad ever made pumpkin pie from scratch.

Pet stories, we don't have much for cooking, really. Found the turkey carcass on the floor the next morning more than once, but other than that... the only holiday disaster story told about pets is the year our dog spent the entire night licking a hole in the back of the chocolate bunny in my Easter basket. (You could not prove chocolate being bad for dogs by any dog my family has ever owned.) I was a tiny tot at the time, and it wasn't until I was nearly a teen that my parents fessed up to this, thereby explaining why "all my life" my baskets had been covered in saran wrap.

YOWZA to the pumpkin. Hot, sloppy pumpkin all over everything. Eh. And that is HILARIOUS about the Easter basket. My mom used to hide plastic eggs in the lamps and then they would burn and melt. woops.

Ugh, I am deep in cooking disasters, because the oven in the new house is dreadful. So frustrating! I'm quite a decent cook, and now I'm burning biscuits and undercooking cakes. Gah.

Still, it's an excuse to keep on baking - I need the practice!

Practice does make (closer to) perfect! My sympathies! I still haven't repaired my upper oven but with an oven thermometer I now know that 175 C in the oven (350F) is 220 (425F) on the dial. it took me a long time to get accustomed to convection as well, which is not a standard feature. I was also going from a gas oven to electric. Good luck!!

My grandfather, a man who strategically deploys his deafness, was visiting one Thanksgiving, and decided to "help" by rebuilding all of our kitchen cupboards. He began this at noon, on Thanksgiving. My mother banished him from the house until the meal was done cooking.

Uhmmmm. That's decidedly not helpful, grandpa. Really, they just decide they are going to do something and nothing will stop them. Nothing. It's like one of my SILs deciding that every, single party event ever is better with warm German potato salad and the secret ingredients of bacon grease and cider vinegar.

There was that one Rosh Hashanah that my dad was cooking a turkey and set his pants on fire when he went to take it out. He didn't notice until I started hitting him with a towel.

He's still a better cook than my mother, who may or may not have figured out how to use the microwave by now.

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Holiday disasters because misery loves company

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